How to Share Ellen White with a Digitally Native, AI Immersed Generation (Part 2)
Welcome back to part 2 of this blog series on Ellen White and younger generations.
Last week I laid out three reasons why young people don't connect with Ellen White anymore. If you haven't read that one yet, start there. Because in this week's blog I want to go beyond those three reasons and explore what else is going on underneath the surface.
But first, we need to go back.
Back to the church I grew up in.
Growing up Adventist
In the SDA church I grew up in (conservative, traditional, fundamentalist), believing in Ellen White wasn't just accepting that she had valuable insights or that she had played a significant prophetic role in reformation history. It was more than that. It meant cross-checking your life against her writings. And as a kid, that cross-check was imposed on you: what you ate, what you wore, even what music you listened to. It felt as though, for everything you liked in life, there was a quote that told you it was wrong. And you couldn’t debate or disagree. That wasn’t an option. So, belief in her prophetic ministry felt a whole lot like the abdication of your personal agency to the writings of a woman everyone told you was divinely inspired and never wrong.
This experience reminds me a whole lot of the popular social media meme that says, “Traditions are just peer pressure from dead people.”
Because thats exactly what belief in Ellen White felt like.
The World That Made This Feel Normal
Back in the day, there was this thing called “epistemic authority” and it was very real.
That’s a fancy way of saying: certain people and institutions owned or “possessed” knowledge. The guy on the stage who had done all the research. The institution that controlled the avenues of data for that research. The government that had access to information no one else did. The university department with all the peer reviewed journals and dissertations. These were the possessors of knowledge that no one else had access to. And so, they decided what was true, what was credible, what story the “facts” told. And for the most part, society largely accepted this. There was a kind of enthusiastic naivette where most people just assumed authority worked this way, and you just abdicated your agency to said authority.
Now of course, you could push back during this time. You could do your own research and arrive at your own conclusions. But doing so was incredibly hard work. There was no Google. Encyclopedia sets were expensive and didn’t cover SDA subcultural debates anyway. If you wanted real information you had to write an actual handwritten letter to someone who might know something, wait weeks for a response, hope they pointed you toward a book, track down that book, read it, then find other books to cross-reference it. Then you had to sort through competing arguments and figure out what you actually believed.
That’s a significant investment. Most people didn’t bother.
In a religious sphere, this meant if the pastor said it, if the denomination said it, (and in SDA circles) if Ellen White said it, then that was largely enough to settle the matter. Epistemic authority was external, someone else controlled the story, and your job was to receive it, and submit to it.
This wasn’t unique to Adventism. It was the shape of the whole world.
The modern era — from roughly the Enlightenment through most of the 20th century — turned away from God and religion, but it continued to operate on the assumption that truth was knowable, that certain institutions had exclusive access to and possession of it, and that the average person’s job was to receive and trust what those who “owned the means of knowledge” said. During this era, and for most secular people, it was science and the professor that had authority. For religious folk, it continued to be the church, it’s traditions, or the preacher on the poster that had the authority.
But then…
As World War II reached its end, a new mood began to sweep through a world that had survived two of the most violent, technologically enhanced wars ever known to man. And this new mood said something radical, something offensive to older generations. It said, cynically and with disdain for the past, that no institution gets to own truth. That every claim is partial. That every authority is situated. That the grand narratives we all thought were true — science, religion, government, reason itself — are all human constructions shaped by power and perspective. That nobody has a view from nowhere. And worse of all, that those who insist they do are using “truth claims” as a veil for their own self-centered pursuit of power.
And when people looked around, they couldn’t argue against that. After all, religion had brought wild injustices like the crusades, inquisitions, and the dark era of indigenous boarding schools, replete with abuses too horrid to contemplate. And then there was science which promised utopia and delivered industrialized killing, weapons of mass desctuction, and the atomic bomb — capable of ending all life on earth.
Postmodernism did not invent the move away from the old order of epistemic authority. As a philosophy, postmodernism merely codified what was already happening in the world. The old order failed all on its own, and now, emerging philosophers began to capture the shift in mood and put it into language, art, and revolution. But even if you never read the philosophers and never consumed the art, you lived inside the revolution. It shaped you, your nervous system, your cosmology. And while this phenomenon was wildly complex, for the purpose of this one blog let me say this: postmodernism made a whole new generation allergic to absolute truth claims. It made them antagonistic toward epistemic authority.
But even then, accessing knowledge was still a tough ask. That is, until the internet arrived. With the onset of the world wide web, what happened to all those institutions whose existence was premised on being the sole possessors of truth? The sole owners of the means of knowledge? They officially lost their monopoly. They lost their ability to control the narrative easily. Knowledge, information, truth claims — these were no longer the property of institutions with exclusive access. They now belonged to everyone. Accessible by anyone. Questionable by a teenager on a smartphone in the middle of a church meeting.
And AI, with its rapid synthesizing of information, has amplified this even more.
The Generation That Grew Up Inside the Rubble
Most young people you meet have never heard the word postmodernism. Haven’t read its philosophers. Couldn’t tell you what epistemic authority means if you spotted them half the answer.
But they live inside it completely.
They grew up in a world where the assumption that any institution possesses the truth, and that your job is to just receive and obey it, is gone.
And this has very specific consequences for Ellen White.
It’s not that younger generations have examined her writings and found them wanting. Most haven’t thought about her at all. What they have is a gut reaction to the posture that old school Adventism asks of them: Abdicate your agency. Cross-check your life against what this woman wrote. Trust the institution that vouches for her. Don’t question it (or her).
That posture is instinctively, viscerally alien to them.
The age of “EGW said it, therefore it’s settled” might still hold in hyper-conservative fundamentalist pockets where the old epistemic order never really cracked. But among younger generations raised in postmodern contexts? That era is over. And for secular seekers? The entire thing reeks of cultism and spiritual abuse.
Hard pass.
The Good News
In part 1 of this series I mentioned that the real reason why young people struggle with Ellen White lies in the digitally native, AI immersed world they now inhabit. And here is what I mean by that. It’s not that smartphones, social media, and AI chatbots have magically eroded interest in Ellen White. It might sound nice when a preacher comes along and hands you a clear enemy to be wary of. But it’s not that simple. Yes, the internet and AI have dealt the final blow to the age of epistemic authority. A young person can instantly fact check and research any claim you make about EGW, or anything for that matter, and find that so much of what we once took for granted as absolutely true is actually way more nuanced, and in some cases demonstrably false.
But it’s not the digital realm. And it’s not AI that’s the problem. Rather, these phenomena simply point us to the deeper shift that already took place before they arrived. A shift away from the assumption that truth can be possessed by particular entities or persons and that my job is to abdicate my agency to the possessors of said truth. The internet and AI make this shift more prominent of course, but the shift was already there.
And this invites us to shift as well. Not shifting theology or truth. But shifting posture. Dismantling our own abuses and misuses. Getting out of the way of our own story.
And if we refuse to get out of the way, if we insist that belief in Ellen White equates to the abdication of one’s agency, then the battle is lost. A generation steeped in epistemic decentralization, empowered and enhanced by the internet, social media, and now AI does not depend on us to tell it what is true and what isn’t like older generations did. They are not bound, restrained, or beholden to our institution or our mythologies. Because it turns out, the new age has forever dismantled all notions that anyone and anything has sole possession of truth. Which means whatever the truth is, and however it looks, they don’t need us to figure it out. That power has now shifted, from the centralized apex of religious systems, to the decentralized expansion of synthesized chatbots and optimized search engines.
However, it’s equally faulty to suggest that the reason young people don’t connect with Ellen White anymore is because of that shift. The truth is a lot less comfortable than that. Because it turns out, there’s no “bad guy” out there we can blame. If there is any villain in the story, truth be told, we are the likeliest candidates. Because Ellen White never said a person should shut their thinking off to believe in her. We did that. She never said a person should abdicate their agency and autonomy to whatever she said. We did that. In fact, during her life she actively repelled such notions. We waited until she died, and then did it anyway. Constantly cross-checking your life to what she said, quoting her for every little thing, using her to settle disputes — she never promoted this. We did.
And yet… even then, we cannot confidently say that the misuse of Ellen White is the culprit either. Because as I said in part 1 of this series, rejecting EGW due to her misuses was a more common explanation for generations X and Y. Generation Z and A are different. They don’t reject her because of her misuse because outside of fundamentalist SDA pockets, most younger generations of Adventists have never encountered this straitjacket Ellen White culture.
So then, the issue, as far as I can tell, lies not in their reaction to a past they do not know, but in their reaction to a mood they already reject. And here is where I think the issue really lies. We must ask ourselves, as a denomination, what precisely does belief in Ellen White mean? What does it look like? When we say we want our youth to believe in EGW, what specifically do we envision?
Because if by “belief” we mean that we want them to adopt her writings the way we did, complete with the abdication of agency and autonomy, to embrace a faith that says this woman cannot be questioned or disagreed with, then we have effectively invited them into a thing their entire nervous system has been conditioned to reject. In this case, its not a harmful past of Ellen White they react to. It is a present proposal full of red flags — a framework that threatens agency and autonomy.
A framework, interestingly enough, Ellen herself rejected.
So then, what is the solution?
I’ll explore that more in Part 3, next week.
For now — has this been your experience with Ellen White? Did belief in her feel like surrendering something you were never meant to surrender?
Share below.
